Wednesday, December 9, 2009

CRU's Source Code: Climategate Uncovered

We can now prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the hockey stick is an absolute ruse. The hockey stick graph cannot possibly be based on the actual data. (Wherever and whatever that data might have been. The CRU has admitted destroying the raw data.)The bottom line is that if this kind of code were to be used by, say, an insurance actuary -- or by someone writing banking software or for tracking the stock market -- the programmer would immediately be fired ... and probably face criminal prosecution.And the former apparently wasn't a particularly well-guarded secret, although the actual adjustment period remained buried beneath the surface.

Plotting programs such as data4alps.pro print this reminder to the user prior to rendering the chart:

IMPORTANT NOTE: The data after 1960 should not be used. The tree-ring density records tend to show a decline after 1960 relative to the summer temperature in many high-latitude locations. In this data set this "decline" has been artificially removed in an ad-hoc way, and this means that data after 1960 no longer represent tree-ring density variations, but have been modified to look more like the observed temperatures.

Others, such as mxdgrid2ascii.pro, issue this warning:

NOTE: recent decline in tree-ring density has been ARTIFICIALLY REMOVED to facilitate calibration. THEREFORE, post-1960 values will be much closer to observed temperatures then (sic) they should be which will incorrectly imply the reconstruction is more skilful than it actually is. See Osborn et al. (2004).